despite months of wrangling the us went off the fiscal cliff when the new year old arrived the congress finally reached a deal they claim is good for the country is it really though we'll dive into the last congress just passed to see who are the real winners and losers. and it was a massive superstorm that caused billions of dollars in damage to new york and new jersey before the one hundred twelfth congress came to an end and the house g.o.p. delayed a vote on hurricane sandy relief so what does this mean for states and the residents that are left in the dark by their own government. and the pentagon has a problem the u.s. relies on drones to conduct warfare around the world now they've launched

a sixteen million dollar effort to prevent high tech flying machines from being tapped so how serious of a problem is this for the u.s. drone program. it's wednesday january second eight pm the washington d.c. meghan lopez if you're watching r.t. . all right topping the news tonight well they've done it in literally an eleventh hour deal the u.s. house of representatives passed a fiscal cliff budget deal that president obama is expected to sign into law so that's that crisis averted right well not even close the u.s. might have avoided economic calamity in the short run but the future of the country is still as uncertain as it was before if not more so let's take a look at the scorecard we wanted to know if the u.s. met the fiscal cliff deadline deadline of midnight december thirty first to avoid

financial repercussions. no despite the fact that congress had almost a year to act it missed a deadline by a day luckily stock markets were closed on new year's day and closed on a positive note today as a result of this new deal and then there's the whole retroactive agreement saying mean that congress can retroactively decide it did not go over the fiscal cliff when in fact technically it did what about the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration or at the crux of the crisis no final decision on how much to cut and where to cut from has been delayed only by a couple of months what's more. could be even more harsh on military programs if a debt and deficit agreement cannot be reached between congress and the white house by this new deadline so did the deal raise the desired amount of revenue to please both republicans and democrats. a big fat no on that one and president obama had to

reel back on his campaign promise to raise taxes on all people making two hundred fifty thousand dollars or more did the fiscal cliff deal with the deal put the u.s. on a long term path to decrease the deficit as was the plan. not even close in fact president obama spoke in very harsh words to congress last night about paying its bills on time digital void a tax increase on the. floyd. not really in might have raised taxes on people making four hundred fifty thousand dollars or more only but it didn't address the payroll tax increases at all meaning that seventy seven percent of the american public will be paying more taxes in federal taxes that is in twenty thirteen for example if you make fifty thousand dollars per year expect to see your taxes increase by about one thousand dollars so despite the fact that congress is breathing a sigh of relief today things are as desperate as ever here in the u.s.

we could still go over the fiscal cliff after all so to talk about all of this and more meckstroth wolf senior analyst at greencastle capital and professor at the new school joined me earlier he started off by talking about the successes and failures on congress's part. i think i would liken it to the following congress took the u.s. government the u.s. economy hostage and they let their hostage go about an hour several hours after the hostage deadline and they now would like to be congratulated for letting their hostages go however since they took the hostages it's hard to be excited that addition to which this has reputational damage the united states as well as really damage the united states because all the uncertainty at all the negativity over the last really ten months almost as this dragged out that particular over the last six weeks have subdued the level of economic activity below where it would have been is just a worst case scenario no is there anything here to congratulate on yourself really the way congress has not unless you live in the parallel universe that seems to

house most of our senior political leadership so max let's talk about the winners and losers here who do you see as the what the biggest winners of last night and the biggest losers well certainly bigger winners and and some of our folks who make between two hundred fifty and four hundred or four hundred fifty thousand dollars as a family i'm not sure that's really the middle class although apparently congress which often earns in that range does think that's the middle class who are the losers here the united states is a loser among the community of nations because we showed our orgiastic dysfunction politically and showed how it effects our economy in a way that's very raw and could not possibly be beneficial in addition to which it is ironic that we watched the party of the republican party fight tooth and nail to keep people from a four percent increase in their taxes if they make basically between two hundred fifty and four hundred fifty thousand dollars but nobody cared all that much to keep the average household from seeing a one thousand dollar increase in their taxes viz a viz the payroll tax increase and i think it's a sort of painful reminder of who butters their bread and where congress is eyes

are focused in terms of who they believe their core constituency is and that that's not even to mention the fact that the u.s. credit ratings will likely be downgraded yet again making it more difficult for the u.s. to borrow money as a government and also more access. and said so let me ask you this why did this bill fall so short i mean was congress so eager to pass a bill any bill at all that it forgot what it was trying to accomplish in the first place and that's quite possible i mean i think you might be better off with a psychiatrist and an economist to figure this out what i would say is the following the difference between a democrat a republican parties here is actually not very big but they've been drinking their kool-aid exaggerating the sort of small difference between them and to some giant difference which really is not fairly true there are things that the democrats really kind of promised there'd be no middle tax no middle class tax increase and there'd be no untitled and cuts we're going to get middle tax for middle income tax increases we're also going to get a title because the republicans are guaranteed to their face will there be no tax

increase but we got them so it's very difficult because there are very few things they promise their various bases democrats or republicans in this deal violated all the basic promises to both basic constituencies so nobody wanted to be responsible for a deal that everybody was much more interested in grandstanding and talking ideological purity than solving with nation's problems of course that's also how we got in to the difficult situation that we find ourselves in and still now and certainly before the deal as well and next we knew that some point there had to be a compromise and not everybody was going to be happy with every part of this bill that's something that we knew about but you just talked about the payroll tax cuts and the end of them and why no one is talking about that so let me ask you this i mean you and i and average americans are going to be paying more and that's just a fact of that seventy seven percent of us are going to be paying more so why was this expected and why isn't congress or anyone for that matter talking about this is this the the thing that is just supposed to be mum on on high on congress' part

. it's a great question to give them the sort of better for the doubt here it was an expiry of a tax cut so what we're seeing is a four and a quarter rate going back to a six and a half or eight about on the payroll tax from the employers the employer employees responsibility so it is actually even. the end of a tax cut as opposed to technically a tax hike although it will feel like one around eleven to thirteen hundred dollars for the average family why are we hearing much about it because they're focusing on the few successes some real some imagined and that is not an area of success and it highlights that when the republican party says no new taxes at all they mean new taxes and including new taxes for people who can afford it when the democratic party says no new taxes for anyone making under two hundred fifty thousand they mean no new taxes except for the new taxes that you know which are thirteen hundred dollars more probably on average per year so nobody really wants to talk about this face play that they executed here they want to talk about the half twist on their way down that they did not how they landed on their face not their feet and that's

why you have to bring up another point there was a couple of the interesting notes with this fiscal cliff deal there is a couple of sweet things that slid under the radar for most people things that you wouldn't expect to see there was four hundred thirty million dollars that was dedicated to hollywood to encourage television and film production three hundred thirty one million dollars went to railroads two hundred twenty two million dollars went to puerto rico and the virgin islands for taxes collected excise taxes collected on the wrong they produced seventy million dollars went to nascar fifty nine million dollars went to algae growers to encourage the production of this sell you lost a biofuel and four million dollars and expanded tax credits went to electric motorcycle makers so i mean in all of those things from what i'm hearing they're all sweeteners or just meant to to encourage people that were really against the fiscal cliff bill to be a little bit more open to it why these deals and why now was this really the most

important thing that needed to be settled. really not but i think those are great examples and some of them quite funny others are sort of tragic comic but it reminds us we're talking about a four trillion dollar budget so the idea that there isn't really money for this or that is really another way of saying what this ought. slee you are not a priority on the payroll tax reminds us that the average working american suffering through really the fifth year of stagnant to negative wage growth is not a priority if we want to look at why i think our debate would have to start out a political system that's auctioning off these jobs and we have to revisit things like citizens united until we do that so bodies a special constituent who needs of asparagus music or needs a bridge to nowhere or needs a special excise tax rebate is going to be first and foremost for congress on like working families because that's who pays for the care of patients and it's a really interesting point to note and i know china and north korea are following this story along with other well leaders are following this story quite closely

they are actually asking the u.s. why is something not being resolved and you know there's a lot of other people that are wondering what kind of a precedent we're setting being a global leader for other countries to be able to resolve their issues max rodwell senior analyst we're going past capital thank you so much for your opinion sir thank you. so ahead on art see you while the new year brings hope for many for residents art by the hurricane sandy life is still pretty grim but that didn't stop congress been ignoring their needs and hunting on sandy really that story when we return.

with these let me or the world let me ask you a question. on this board is where we are in the. maybe that's a little space thing there again during the break we're in the united states on the surveillance me.

welcome back well the fiscal cliff deal wasn't the only news coming out of capitol hill last night more than two months after one of the most destructive storms to ever hit the u.s. made landfall the u.s. house of representatives has yet to pass a sixty point four billion dollars hurricane sandy relief bill that the senate approved of last week instead the house chose not to vote on the bill last night now this afternoon governor chris christie of new jersey delivered a fiery speech about the state of affairs in his garden state he took one shot

after another at house speaker john boehner and house republicans for their quote toxic internal politics. for the victims of sandy in new jersey new york and connecticut it's been sixty six days and the wait considers. there's only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims the house majority and their speaker john boehner. and you know what he's right when hurricane katrina completely leveled parts of louisiana and other locations around the gulf back in two thousand and five then president george w. bush signed the first relief bill in a mere four days after that her and that storm made landfall meanwhile it's been sixty six days since hurricane sandy hit the eastern shore board and funding has yet to be approved now initial estimates of hurricane sandy say that at least fifty to sixty billion dollars in damages was inflicted across the northeast but those estimates could be on the low end when all things are said and done after

a meeting between the tri state area congress members and house leadership it looks like the house of representatives will in fact vote on a nine billion dollars deal in flood insurance on friday and the whole bill it will be voted on on january fifteenth but still that means more than seventy days will pass before anything is actually done to help those victims michael brooks is the producer of the majority report he joined me earlier to talk from new york about what the holdup is in this seemingly simple decision. this is really hard to explain i mean maybe republicans just hate new york and new jersey in the tri state area but you know a little bit less flippantly i think one thing that happens is a lot of times we accuse republicans of. you know being hypocrites on fiscal policy which they often are so they will complain about out of control deficit and all the rest and then they go and they splurge on tax cuts and corporate welfare and all

the other sort of things they want to throw money at. and then you know i think what we're seeing here is another strain of republicanism which is sort of putting will or not putting its money where its mouth is which is there is a strain in the tea party and people like that who simply don't believe in federal relief no matter how serious the disaster and we're actually seeing this put into play it's a really extreme idea it's a really extreme policy and i think boehner is probably backing off because the fiscal deal has just gone through and his caucus is very upset and they don't want to spend any more money and particularly if it involves spending money on new yorkers and michael that's actually really interesting point that you made obviously governor chris christie was very upset but he wasn't the only republican who was so fired up about the house of representatives decision not to vote on the bill last night peter king he's notoriously republican also notoriously outspoken

was actually very vocal about this issue as well and i want to play for you part of what he said about the matter. republicans be go walk to the floor without allowing a vote and i'm just saying these people have no problem finding new york these republicans and they're trying to raise money they raise millions of dollars in new york city and new jersey they think they're going to christie around the country raising millions of dollars for them i'm saying anyone from new york new jersey who contributes one penny to the republican gresham campaign committee of the head examined i would not give one penny to these people based on what they did to our lives and i know michael representative king went as far as to insinuate that he will begin voting independently if a solution is not reached and soon so now we have these republicans that are attacking their own party i mean do you think that as you were kind of just mentioning the republican party is experiencing a fundamental shift well that was some good long island talk from from peter king i don't know if it's a fundamental shift i think in peter king's case he's

a savvy guy he knows his constituents and he knows who is speaking to even when he's doing some really ugly things like his is muslim american baiting which is really been the main focus of his recent congressional career but he's got to be looking over his shoulder and saying look if my entire national party will do nothing they won't lift a finger to help my constituents who are in the middle of a slow motion at this point catastrophe how can i both i think he cares both ethically but also as a question of political survival make excuses for that he can't so michael let me ask you this do you think that this is a matter of people senator scott mayors in the tri state area versus the rest of the republican party or do you think that this is a line being drawn between traditional republicans and tea party members. well i think at this point it might even be a line between pretty conservative right wing republicans and tea partiers i mean

were were because you know there's a kind of other line of real moderate republican ism which is pretty much nonexistent now but there's also people who i think a lot of the kind of tribes the delegation would represent who are really still very conservative very right wing but they have a fundament the they have a certain rationality in their view of government and they know that ability this is never been held up before it's pretty extraordinary and obviously they also have to look out for their constituents too so i think it might be a dividing line between what's left of a more kind of rational republicanism and really extreme tea party ism and michael an interesting point to make is that governor chris christie he made a speech that disaster relief was in a political issue before but it clearly is now is this what the u.s. is coming to everything big and little is divided down down party lines really. yeah i mean it's pretty extraordinary there is never been a hold up on

a disaster bill like this before i think that they're going to have to make some moves the kind of the mill you rate this i mean it's a on the scale is smaller but a couple of years ago republicans held up a bill that would have provided. funding for first responders if it was specifically firefighters around september eleventh got held up until people like jon stewart and other people kind of made a big deal of it so. i i think it's symptomatic of a lot of other things and it's disturbing and disappointing i don't know how shocking it is to be honest but what we do know is that it has been in fact sixty six days since hurricane sandy hit and yet these people are still waiting governor christie went on to call them being treated like second class citizens so we'll just have to wait and see if something actually does come out friday and subsequently in january fifteenth michael brooks producer of the majority report thank you for your time sir hey thank you so much. even though you might be wearing

your winter jackets right now and cranking up that thermostat don't expect to keep the heat on for too long why while following weather patterns from two thousand and twelve it seems mother nature might have made a new year's resolution of her own that is to record the hottest temperatures ever according to the united kingdom's met office which has recorded world temperatures since eighteen fifty it is very likely that twenty thirteen will rocket to the top of the list of the hottest years on record that means it would be to the current record holder two thousand and ten it's also worth noting though that cities like washington d.c. and alvin in new york saw their thermometers reaching unprecedented temperatures in two thousand and twelve but it's not just the heat that's the problem it's the high temperature heat cause it's the problems that high temperatures cause the main issue is quote we're dying of weather as seen in everything from record breaking droughts in the united states to the freak weather events like hurricane sandy

these weather phenomenons are actually expected to become more frequent in the year ahead record breaking temperatures also have a huge effect on agriculture so expect food prices to become as high as the temperature itself. now as with most all global problems the impoverished are also the most vulnerable to these temperature changes and all that comes with them let's use the horn of africa as an example data compiled by the department for international development suggests that between fifty to one hundred thousand people more than half of them who were children under the age of five died in two thousand and eleven in the horn of africa due to the drought that affected somalia ethiopia and kenya and if this year's expected to be as bad as it is in terms of temperature we now expect the consequences to be as disastrous if not more so on a global scale so get out of your shorts and get out your shorts and fans and be

sparing with your water and get used to the heat it seems high temperatures in all the dangers that come with them are here to stay at least for the next year anyway . well congress might have been dragging its feet for the past couple of months when it comes to dealing with its financial instability but the pentagon sure hasn't been its problem the so-called pervasive vulnerability of drones when it comes to hackers according to the pentagon from your science and technology division you a.v.'s are prone to the same kind of hacks as our computers cars and medical devices only these machines are designed to kill people the problem comes down to control algorithms the code writing is done in an unsafe and easily hackable manner and what's worse there's no way to check the vulnerabilities of these machines but where there's a will there's a way researchers are working on the correct. for ways to correct this problem with

a new sixty million dollar program earlier today i was joined by scott horton contributing editor at harper's magazine to speak about the vulnerabilities of these machines i started off by asking him what a vulnerable most drone even means in the first place. no doubt about it you know the fact that they're unmanned is also the killie's heel of this program that is they're being operated from a far by the transmission of signals so of course if that signal stream can be can be replicated can be interrupted the vehicle itself can be hijacked and we've seen a number of incidents of that i mean just this summer a group of students at the university of texas at austin demonstrated that they could hack their way into some drones right into the nose of some representatives of v.h.s. and they would go back over the last three or four years we see a half dozen incidents in which hostile forces in iraq in afghanistan in iran

have claimed to have been able to hack in to or intercept drones so the pentagon every term has insisted that that isn't the case but there have been drones to veered off course and have landed at places where they shouldn't have landed which suggests that something went wrong and we do know this is an issue when it comes to coding the problem is that there's just no way to check the vulnerabilities and piece together the software running our drawings so what is the way to fix it and is the sixty million dollars project really going to succeed at fixing all of the elements of this drone program. but there's no such thing as a perm that can actually here i mean what you're going to see is. is a constant need to update and upgrade security systems for the operation of these programs and there's a risk of ported any point that just as program designers working for the

department of defense in the united states develop new systems to protect or shield the communications and guidance systems. other groups. just as innovative bright young people in other countries will develop new systems to hack into him so it's a problem that's not going to go away and this is going to be an issue not just with the military grooms operator of the control the department of defense in the cia it's also going to be a problem with the new fleets of drones are being developed for domestic use within the united states by police forces for instance we're going to see the same problems with. scott we've had and we've heard this compared to your average everyday royal mail things medical devices computers and whatnot i mean safari in microsoft word when something happens to them they are able to give you some type of virus software but as you just mentioned we're going to have to constantly

update this software the problem is though that a drone when you updated it means you have to really sort of fi the entire project so talk about i mean obviously it's going to cost more than the sixty million dollars that they're talking about we're talking about taking each and every sale drone back to square one right. well i think it's you know you can't really view this is a one time sixty million dollar package and the issue is over rather it is going to have to be a continual process upgrading security and developing new security systems as the drones themselves develop and the problem here is that the severity of the risk because this is a weapons system so that if these drones can be hacked not only can the information they're collecting be downloaded intercepted now the most likely targets will be the most likely people to do it will be the people who are the target so there's no great risk of them collecting that but the weapons systems can

be turned around and used against us and i think that that's a much bigger problem for us in the long term so let's talk about this this possible solution the sixty million dollars that's called the high assurance cyber military systems are h.s.a. m s program and what it's saying is going to do is it's trying to get a bunch of people together a bunch of cyber internet expressly able to help create a code that will in turn have fun explaining this correctly create flawless codes of. that rights other codes am i right in this so far that's correct ok so then what is saying is not only are we going to have to start writing our own codes that are on hackable manageable and things like that but also what it's going to have to do is it's going to have to create this security control code so can we just get into a little bit of the details here with all the steps that is going to take in order

to have these drones be fully operational and do we have any kind of data knowing when when the system will be in place when the only thing that was incorrect about you said before is the idea that there are. codes and systems there aren't. there or you could introduce a new system and there will be a you can imagine a clock ticking for the time it was reduced the system until someone is able to break into it so what's really required is constant turnover constant change and you're always going to be just a few steps ahead of the actors. all right scott horton contributing editor at harper's magazine there's a lot of information and we appreciate you helping us break it down. and that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we cover go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america and click common for those stories to your friends check out our website r.t. dot com slash usa and as is tradition i.